Theme From A Lost Spy Movie?

Okay, time for one short message to introduce the third member of our merry band. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr Craig P. Sinclair:

Yay! Woo!

Late of this parish, Mr Sinclair moved on to pastures new in the heart of the city and now spends his time writing surreal plays about beekeepers, directing short films about urban witchcraft and honing his skills as the musical genius behind acclaimed Scouse Victorian Goth merchants Lovecraft. He has also been known to play live with Zombina & The Skeletones, but under an assumed name and so much makeup that no-one's actually sure if he's still in the band or not.

For our purposes though, all you need to know is that he was the first test subject for Doubtless Wonder and allowed the festering mess to infect his brain until he began to produce themes for the main characters (like the one you are currently listening to - Miss Felicity's Theme) and gloriously deranged collages, the most family friendly of which currently sits at the top of this page. He will no doubt provide us with many more wonderful works, and we will repay his kindness by stealing his name and his likeness and plastering them all over Soho's most insalubrious phone booths.

And all in time for his birthday.

(Originally published 06/05/09)

Annotations - String Theory and the Immaculate Conception of Imogen Dangerfield

This piece was written on the day of posting and is a reaction to the previous - Woman of Mass Destruction chapter by Karl.

It's wonderful how these chapters bounce off and collide with each other.

STatICoID also introduces characters, locations, groups and incidents that date back to the inception of Doubtless Wonder in the early 1990's.

The piece is split into three differing time frames and locations, spread out over 15 years. However, the incidents occur within only minutes of each other on a linear timeline. This brings into play the notion of Cause and Effect. Each incident is carried into the next, almost like a narrative relay race, and creates the relational Causality. I'll post some links to Causality philosophy on our sister website(Notes on the Sublime).

The line "Imogen Dangerfield wept salty tears on the edge of the chemical soaked embankment" relates to an actual location within Widnes, Cheshire known as The Bongs. The Bongs (An Olde Cheshire name for light wood) acts as a natural border between Western and Eastern Widnes and is intersected by the Bowers Brook, which opens directly into the River Mersey. About 15 to 20 years ago the brook was used as a chemical waste outlet for local industry and it was not uncommon for it to change colour on a daily basis. The nearby embankment was also covered in an oily film, that when stepped on, would leave a multi coloured footprint. Hence, "the chemical soaked embankment". The Liverpool - Manchester line runs through the northern section of The Bongs. It is also worth noting that the original screenplay and short movie for Doubtless Wonder was going to be filmed on The Bongs back in the early to mid 90's. I'm sure Karl has some recce photo's, from the period, stashed away somewhere...

Thollon-le-Baines is a corruption of Thollon-le-Memises and Evian-le-Baines. It's a wonderful location set between the French Alps and Lake Geneva. It was also the location for Mr and Mrs Roberts' Honeymoon in 2004. Incidentally, Evian is the source for Evian mineral water and the location for the 2003 G8 Summit. Does this have something to do with Imogen Dangerfield?

The man in fatigues talks to someone called 'Swedish'. Look out for Swedish in further chapters.

'Colonel Blue' is Monk Blue's rank within the SAF. Yet again, the SAF will be explained in further chapters. I don't want to give too much away here.

The final incident is set within a high school mathematics lesson. This harks back to the original birthplace of Doubtless Wonder. Where two young idealists dragged DW into the expectant arms of our current dimension space.

'The Red City' is another name for the Moroccan City of Marrakesh. This relates directly to 'The Marrakesh Express' in WOMD.

The Dandelion Brigade is a specialist detachment of the SAF (see prior comments for SAF).

The Algebraic equation here, is actually a String Theory equation for motion. For more info on String Theory, look at: Notes on the Sublime.

Well there we have it. We just have to wait for the next installment. In the meantime, check out our sister blog; Notes on the Sublime-Comments on Doubtless Wonder.

Cheers

Phil


(Originally Published 21/04/09)

Annotations : Woman Of Mass Destruction

So, the first couple of pieces are up and digging for something to write about while we wait for next weekend, when we get the next chapter, I thought again about the annotations I used to put together. These are a sort of a DVD extra, alternate ending kind of deal; I've redacted a couple of spoilers here and there so we don't ruin the whole arc plot inthe first couple of weeks, but otherwise, this is exactly as it was at the time. I don't necessarily agree with half the ideas in here now, and I'm not sure where most of the plot threads were leading, but they're an interesting glimpse into the mind of the writer a day or so after the chapter itself was finished. What's most interesting to me is the stuff that I only pulled out on reading the finished chapter, the stuff I included in the writing without even realising it was there....

Obviously, MB think’s he’s Galactus at the start here, with FM as his Silver Surfer. He’s part Spider Jerusalem, part HST in this episode, raving and staggering like a king hell acid fiend. The dress, qat and Allah references all place us somewhere in the Arab states.
Pictures Of Lilly – The Who. A young man obsessing over a dead woman – Foreshadowing later moments, or telling us something now about FM? Also, John C Lilly was a contemporary of Leary who wrote the classic texts on isolation tanks and ketamine use. He also wrote a lot on the possible communication between human and dolphin, which may also turn up in later stories. Ketamine is often used as a battlefield tranquiliser, especially in developing nations, so its purchase here is in keeping with current usage.
Poppy field – opiates are still a major source of income in the Afghan mountain towns.
Dotar – an Afghan stringed instrument usually played at weddings. Afghan folk/classical music has no tradition of mourning/funerary music, so the use here suggests that the things in the station have taken part in a marriage of sorts, though clearly less than happy.
Dari – again, the predominant language in the Afghan mountains.
I am travel weary… This paraphrases a poem by Jami, a 13th century Sufi mystic poet. Basically, a traveller arrives in a teeming city and wonders how he’ll recognise himself in the morning. He ties a pumpkin to his ankle, but when he wakes, a beggar has stolen it and tied it to their own leg. The wanderer exclaims, if I’m me, who are you, and if you’re me, then who am I? Much Sufi poetry deals with the impermanence of identity, with the idea that we’re all part of the deity, so arbitrary distinctions such as you, me, us and them are illusory. We are all part of the greater being, like the thing in the station. That could mean that FM and MB are part of a greater whole, or that FM kills god, depending on your point of view here.
The Beloved is all that lives… A line from the multi-volume epic poem written by Rumi, another Sufi poet from the 15th century, widely regarded as the Persian Qu’ran (it does have a name, but I can neither recall nor pronounce it…). Again, the lover is revealed as simply an extension of the divine, with all love truly owing to the creator. But is FM referring to the man or herself here?
The scene of MB writing FM’s true name in the sand – This is another steal from the Jami poem referenced above. A young man writes his lover’s name in the sand again and again, an epic novel which no-one will ever read. The name is as unreal and brief as the lover and the love. The only thing which truly exists is the sand and the wind. This also ties into xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, as well as further foreshadowing a possible death.
The Marrakesh Express – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The classic song about travelling to the Middle East in search of heavy medicine and enlightenment – Is that what we’ve found here? Also, as with The Who track, this firmly places MB in the late 60s, early 70s.
The latex mask – Just to suggest that the FM who was scarred by the man is NOT the FM who kills him, and also riffing on the old Mission Impossible series, where the super secret agents wore rubber masks to do their dastardly deeds in the name of Nixon’s government.
I’ve also got a back-story for the thing in the station, but whether we’ll ever get to it…

And that's it for now. Check back later and I might get round to introducing our special guest artist / composer. Or not.

Cheers,

Karl

(Originally Published 16/04/09)

Author's Note : Everything That Happens...

...Will Happen Today.

Which is probably rather unlikely, seeing as there's only about an hour of it left. Still, one thing which will happen is that the epic Doubtless Wonder will finally be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. And that's about as close to Everything as you can get.

But what a long, strange trip it's been. Way back at the dawn of the second Summer Of Love, when clothes were baggy and the Stone Roses were the hot young things, a couple of Northern schoolboys decided that rather than pay attention in Maths class, they would instead spend their time in pursuit of far loftier ideals, like the creation of a completely new universe and the ceaseless psychological torture of the fat kid at the next desk. We broke him in a week, but the universe took a little longer to assemble.

Starting out as a hazy, drug-soaked riff on Alice In Wonderland, Doubtless Wonder was a fairly straightforward tale: Swallowing an experimental halucinogenic, a young woman finds herself trapped in a nightmare world of crazed fishermen, sword-wielding David Bowie clones and robotic policemen. Simple.

But while the plot was too small, the ideas were probably too big for us to do them justice at the time. We thought we knew it all and that we could express it in a better way than anyone else ever had, but looking back on photos from the time we were little more than babies. Judging from some of the fragments that remain of this and other great projects, we were dour, earnest, hopelessly in thrall to Philip K Dick and JRR Tolkien and possessed of that special strain of pretentiousness that can only be found in wannabe teenage poet-warriors. I can't speak for Phil, but I know that I was so bad I thought Jim Morrison had a really, y' know, incisive grasp of, like, the human condition.

Sweet Jesus....

So time passed and things changed. Jobs came and went, girlfriends too (and lets face it, how earnest can a warrior poet be once he's finally got his end away? Lets see My Chemical Romance weep on stage when they've all been blown in the dressing room - The best they'd manage is a guitar-heavy rendition of I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing...). College, university, psychotic breakdowns and trips to Amsterdam all left their marks on us and our little shared world. Phil made short films and worked as a runner for one of the more embarrassing hair metal bands (and I'm too much of a gentleman to say which one, but if you pester him enough he might let it slip). I wrote a Brit-pop vampire screenplay called Live Forever and a mutant police procedural in which everyone was dying of the plague, neither of which went anywhere, mostly because I didn't have the balls to show them to anyone beyond my immediate friends and family. Every so often, we'd get together, shoot the shit and reminisce about the great, lost works of our youth; Bloodstock. Limelight. And what was that wierd thing with the fishman?

Oh yeah. Doubtless Wonder. What was that about again?

Sometime around the turn of the millenium I moved down to Essex to be with the great love of my life. At the time the internet was something that other people had, so we would have to settle for snail mail to stay in touch and we decided that we would send something more than the usual Hi, hello, how are you? We would start to write a lengthy, episodic tale, each responding to the other's chapter until we had a whole novel to start shipping round publishers. We'd both hit 25 by this point (Phil was all grown up, with a house and a dog and everything), so time was ticking by and if we wanted to write the first great English novel of the 21st century then we had to get started pretty sharpish. Phil's first piece features Monk Blue and Felicity Makeshift as terrorists blowing up schools. Mine features Storm Thorgerson and sigil magic. Before we know it, we're back in Doubtless Wonder. It seems that ten or so years of neglect had turned it into some sort of wierd fictional graveyard where all the unfinished stories dragged themselves off to to die. Arihaily was in there somewhere, various vampires and superheroes, pretty much anything we had ever intended to write. We had a whole world full of ideas that were crossing and colliding in strange new ways, sparking off each other and sending ripples outward through everything we did. It couldn't fail.

So naturally, we ran out of steam after about 5 chapters.

Flash forward another couple of years. I'm moving back to the North to find a job and a house because the prices in Essex were ridiculous (This was around March 2003 - God knows what they're like now). Phil has the house to himself and works bizarre shifts and agrees to let me crash there for as long as it takes. In the end, I'm there about a month and a half, and in all that time we see each other for more than five minutes maybe half a dozen times. Other than that we leave each other cakes and cryptic messages in the kitchen and try not to get in the way. When we do get together we watch documentaries about the siege at Waco, eat lots of nachos and talk about what might have been. Bloodstock. Limelight. And what was that crazy thing with the terrorists?

And then one day, I sit down at Phil's new PC, tear my eyes away from the amazing new world of internet porn (my far better half had handed her notice in at this point but was still trapped in Chelmsford for several weeks so don't judge me too harshly) and I start to write. I don't actually know which one of us suggested it, or whether my piece came first or not, but I remember the thrill of creation, of actually doing it. When Phil got home, there was a small pile of A4 next to the danish pastry I'd left in the kitchen. When I got up the next day, not too long after he had gone to bed, I found a similar sheaf of paper next to my bedroom door.

A month later, we printed everything we had and laid it out on the living room carpet. If we put this piece first, then this one, then that one... But what about this one? Where does the poem fit? The Japanese advertisement? The transcript of intercepted messages between Midge and Swedish Chainsaw?

Somehow, in the same way that a house full of women are said to gradually synchronise their cycles with that of the dominant female, we had both fallen into the same rhythm. Something about the concept allowed us to write entirely separate from each other but develope the same themes and ideas. We could take those chapters and assemble them into something far greater than either of us had previously considered; a patchwork novel of conflicting voices, hearsay and advertising jingles which would gradually coalesce into the story of three generations of outright crazy people and their connection to the strange realm of Doubtless Wonder.

And then the real world gets in the way. Again.

Another few years pass. We change jobs, repeatedly. We both get married. I buy a house, Phil becomes a father, I follow him a couple of years later. Sometime around 2007, we're talking. Bloodstock. Limelight. That mosaic novel thing, what was it?

Another dozen or so pieces appear in a flurry of activity. I start to work out the main themes in my pieces and obsessively annotate them, looking for points of reference, different ways in and out of the story. I rewrite old pieces as if they were 1960s underground comix, then write them again as kitchen sink alien invasion tales. I throw in every half-baked notion I've ever wanted to write about; my new found vegetarianism, my flirtation with buddhism and my thoughts about my father. And music. Always with the music. The day Tony Wilson dies I write him into a chapter. John Peel's in there too, along with My Sweet Lord and Freddy And The Dreamers.

There's a website and a myspace page, I steal the name of my cousin's band for a group of 70s stoners, then cheekily ask him to write some songs for them. Fliss and Monk get their own theme tunes and I start looking into print on demand services. All of a sudden finding a publisher doesn't seem like a concern, and making a profit never was. We can upload everything to a site like Lulu and let people make their own minds up whether to buy it or just read it for free on our own website. More pieces follow, layering in different levels of reality, divergent timelines and multiple identities. Song lyrics, photos, the beginnings of a screenplay.

And then it's dark, for a long time. Stuff happens, life drags along, nothing gets written. We mothball the website and take down the myspace page. There's one last effort at rallying the troops, previewing a few pieces under an assumed name on Urbis, and the results are encouraging but it's not enough. Doubtless Wonder dies a fourth time, leaving behind a trail of incoherent emails and a couple of nice collages that were intended for the dust jacket.

Felicity Makeshift is dead. Long live Felicity Makeshift.

And then last Friday night we went to see David Byrne at the Liverpool Philharmonic. Taking a pre-gig drink or two, we got to talking. Same as it ever was: Limelight. Bloodstock. Yadda yadda yadda.

But what if? And how about? And then?

And within an hour or so, we were back. It's about 20 years since we created this crazy little world (and about 18 since we last saw David Byrne) and a lot has happened in that time, but some things never change. The buzz of working out each new link in the chain is as strong as ever. Doubtless Wonder is the puzzle we've been trying to solve for all of our adult lives. Pretty much every idea we've ever had has come from those fertile grounds, however remote they may seem at times, and every path we've taken has somehow lead back there.

So here it is. The earliest pieces date back to the end of the last century, while the most recent is being written even as I type this. In between, there are dozens of fragments which gradually add up to tell the tales of Marg Cornell, Felicity Makeshift, Monk Blue, Harry Love and countless others whose lives are touched by Wonder. Every other Saturday, somewhere between the end of Doctor Who and the stroke of midnight, one of us will post a new piece on here. Between each piece we'll be popping back to see what's happening. If you want to discuss hidden references, plot developments, secret identities or major influences then this is the place to do it. We're more than happy to talk to anyone who reads our work, and if you want to go off topic and recommend films, books and music that might go down well then feel free. We'll probably go OT quite often ourselves to tell you about films we've seen, places we've taken the kids, the latest comics we've bought and the blogs we're reading. And if you just want to wade in and trash the great endeavour then go for it - I'm pretty sure it's tough enough to outlast us all now.

Cheers,

Karl

(Originally Published 05/04/09)

And now for the weather......

www.davidlynch.com/dailyreport/index.html

We were not the only ones.......................

www.uk-ufo.co.uk/2009/05/grange-drive-penketh-warrington-1st-may-2009/

www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/news/4380667.UFOs_spotted_in_the_night_skies/

UFO Observation at 23:12

May 1st, 23:12, Warrington, Cheshire

The wife and I have just observed 5 orange lights travelling in the sky over Great Sankey, Warrington, Cheshire. The first 3 were in a triangle formation at first, the back 2 then went into a straight line, followed by another 2 in a straight line. There was no noise, they moved silently and disappeared slowly, as if going into cloud cover and never re-appearing. They first appeared to be fireworks or flares, but followed a formation and were definitely neither. Never seen anything like this ever.

Phil and Karen